10/24/2006 @ 1:15PM

America's Most Generous States

Charitable giving among the affluent is strongest in the Midwest and South, according to a new study, with chart-topping Utah residents donating more than double the national average.

In the study, which was adjusted for cost of living, the most generous states were Utah, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Minnesota and Georgia. Wealthy people–those with incomes over $200,000–in those states gave 1.1% of their assets to charity, well above the national average of 0.7%.

NewTithing Group, a non-religious nonprofit, conducted the study using five years of Internal Revenue Service data. The group aims to increase charitable giving through information on philanthropic investment and budgeting.

“Some communities have a deeply embedded culture of charitable giving,” says NewTithing executive director Tim Stone. “Without it, people tend to give reactively instead of proactively. They wait until the end of the year, eyeball what they think they can give and end up lowballing what they can afford.”

States don’t develop strong giving traditions by accident, says Emmett Carson, former president of the Minneapolis Foundation, which manages $700 million in assets. “It isn’t that Midwestern people are better people,” Carson says. “City planners, businessmen and leaders recognized the need to create a strong sense of ‘we live here together’ to attract and hold people in a place where temperatures can be 20 or 30 below.”

The Minneapolis-St. Paul area also has one of the nation’s most expensive public parks systems, as well as the highest concentration of arts and theater facilities outside of New York City.

The richest states, ironically, are among the stingiest. None of the ten richest states cracked the top 25 in giving percentage. California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas couldn’t match their neighbors who gave more with less.

California has the largest number of people with incomes above $200,000, but it ranks 21st in giving percentage. Sandra Hernandez, CEO of the San Francisco Foundation, a nonprofit investment organization with assets of $850 million, says giving percentage doesn’t tell the whole story.

“You have a lot of young, superrich people in California, and they give in different, more hands-on ways,” says Hernandez. “Giving tends to be based on life experience, and many of these people are very early in their life paths.”

The NewTithing study only incorporated the donation of liquid assets and did not include volunteering, which accounts for 2.2% of the United States’ gross domestic product, according to the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project.

Yet volunteering rates largely mirror charitable giving. The RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service at the University of Texas-Austin tracks volunteerism rates by state. At the top of the list? Utah, where 46.5% of residents volunteer. Filing out the top five were Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota–states with high giving rates–and Vermont, which ranked 43rd in the NewTithing study.

It’s no coincidence that the two surveys found such similar results. “The investment of time is followed by the investment of money, not the other way around,” Carson says. “It makes giving sustainable. The communities high on the [NewTithing] list understand that.”

While some states are stingier than others, Americans in general are relatively generous, at least when it comes to private charities. The Johns Hopkins study found that Americans rank first in giving rate, almost 40% higher than the second-place Israelis.

That makes experts optimistic. “People across the country want to give money,” says NewTithing director Stone. “These rates will go up if people can get the information they need and can teach their children how to give to charities.”